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Amazon has unveiled an enhanced version of its voice assistant, dubbed Alexa+, which could potentially bring new revenue streams for businesses.
Alexa and the Echo range of speakers largely pioneered AI assistants in the home, but Alexa has fallen a long way behind rivals such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini in terms of intelligence. Alexa+ is an attempt to close the gap and perhaps even surpass the generative AI services that have dominated the tech industry for the past couple of years.
In particular, the new service offers several ways to interact with businesses, with the “agentic” AI able to book restaurants, navigate websites and order goods on the user’s behalf.
Amazon offered “live” demonstrations of many of these services at its Alexa+ launch event in New York today.
For example, Panos Panay, the company’s relatively new head of devices and services, asked Alexa+ to recommend pizza restaurants close to where the event was happening, with the AI seemingly relying on Yelp reviews to offer recommendations of nearby eateries.
It’s capable of multi-task commands too. For example, a later demonstration showed someone booking a table at a restaurant via OpenTable, with Alexa+ automatically adding that to their calendar, and then offering to book an Uber taxi for an invited guest. Amazon has a whole host of commercial partners signed up to offer such integrations.
Alexa+ will, of course, be able to order goods from Amazon too. This could be good news for Amazon retailers if ordering is smoother than the rather convoluted process you have to go through with voice ordering currently. For example, you could ask Alexa+ to recommend a recipe and then have the ingredients added to your Amazon grocery list. Those two different services – recipes and grocery shopping – are not joined up today, but will be with Alexa+.
It’s not only physical goods that Alexa+ will be able to order. Amazon demonstrated the service being used to hunt for tickets for a baseball game, with Alexa+ setting a price alert for when the ticket prices dipped below $200. The tickets could be ordered from a partner such as Ticketmaster.
Beyond retail, Amazon demonstrated a host of other Alexa+ features, including the ability to play songs or albums based on fairly loose descriptions (“the song that plays first in Mama Mia!”), the ability to write and illustrate children’s stories, and the more conventional ability to upload documents and interrogate them.
Alexa+ will be made available in early access from next month. The company says it will start rolling out in the “US in the next few weeks, and subsequently in waves in the coming months starting with households with Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21”. It doesn’t look like older audio-only speakers will get the new service. Alexa+ will also be available via a new mobile app and the web.
It will cost $19.99 per month, but will be offered free to Amazon Prime subscribers. Whether Amazon will use this as an excuse to further hike the price of Amazon Prime remains to be seen.
